a design rationale model for green human computer ...in terms of software industry, sustainable...

A Design Rationale Model for Green Human

Computer Interaction Design

Abdulmajid Hissen Mohamed Sebha University, PO Box 19778, Sebha, Libya

Email: [email protected]

Abdulsalam Mansour Alshrief and Mabrouka Ali Jelban Tripoli University, Alfornaj Street, Tripoli, Libya

Email: [email protected]

Abstract—Curbing the global environmental threats become

a worldwide issue. Over the years, significant scientific

evidences emerged that highlighted the relationship between

massive industrialization and global environmental threats.

For this reason, all types of industrialization are undergoing

radical re-engineering; the aim is to manufacture goods and

services that are efficient, safer and environmental-friendly.

In terms of software industry, sustainable software

engineering has become a hot research topic; it spans

sustainability issues in all stages of software life cycle. This

paper proposes a design rationale model for human-

computer interaction design. The proposed model is an

adaptation of the QOC deliberation model, where green

computing guidelines are used as criteria for the evaluation

of interface design decisions. As part of the collaborative

decision making process pertaining interactions design

decisions, we believe that there is a need to provide

designers with contextual guidance that help to construct a

shared mental model about the design problem, and how it

is influenced by the recommendations of the Green IT

campaign. For this reason, we incorporated the Green

computing guidelines within the elements of the proposed

design rationale model. The paper is also presenting a

prototypical implementation of the proposed model.

Index Terms—green computing, sustainable software,

design rationale, knowledge reuse, greenhouse effects

I. INTRODUCTION

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a research topic

that overlaps with human, technology and environmental

issues. Though there are extensive researches on

sustainability issues in many disciplines, but there is little

written specifically about sustainability and interaction

design in the main corpus of the HCI literature [1]. Since

2010 greater attention is given to IT and software

sustainability, better known as Green computing [2]. The

primary goal of the Green computing campaign is the

manufacturing and use of computing resources more

efficiently, while maintaining the overall systems’

performance. This campaign is expected to lower IT

power consumption and the IT waste, and so leading to

minimising the causes of global warming phenomena that

Manuscript received December 1, 2016; revised June 26, 2017.

endangers the universe. Contributions of the IT resources

to this phenomenon are witnessed by the increasing

demand for computing power to cater for managing the

huge global business activities. This demand for

computing power has increased during the past two

decades, causing an increase in IT-related power

consumption and resulting higher carbon emissions [3].

But the increasing use of computing power has led to

exploiting more power-hungry machines in the form of

powerful PCs, servers and huge data centers.

Unfortunately, greater part of these systems and its

consumables would be dumped later in the form of

electronic waste (e-waste) that endangers the

environment and all types of living species. In regard to

software interaction design, decisions involved in this

process have a major influence on the sustainability of the

software services and products being designed. Therefore,

design decisions related to the selection of hardware and

software artefacts has to be in line with the Green

computing guidance and recommendations.

The rest of this paper is organised as follows. In

Section 2 we highlighted motivational attributes behind

the Green computing campaign, and also presented the

likely threats of manufacturing IT services and products

in the conventional way. Section 3 briefly introduces the

design rationale models, and the proposed model is

described in Section 4. Section 5 shows a prototypical

implantation of the proposed model. Section 5 ends with

some brief concluding remarks.

II. GREEN COMPUTING ISSUES

The main issues of Green computing campaign are: the

increasing systems power consumption; and the ever

escalating volumes of dumped e-waste. Alarming figures

of power consumption rates is attributed to many IT

related technologies and practices. For example, over the

last decade, data centers have become a part of most

organisational IT strategies, meanwhile, enterprise-scale

data centers account for about half of corporate energy

use and resulting carbon footprint [4]. In order to lower

the impact of this problem, there are many new

technologies emerged to rationalise the power

requirements of the data centers, such as the virtualization,

Lecture Notes on Information Theory Vol. 5, No. 1, June 2017

29©2017 Lecture Notes on Information Theorydoi: 10.18178/lnit.5.1.29-33

which is a technique that enables Intel to combine several

physical systems into a virtual machine that runs on a

single, powerful base system, thus significantly reducing

power consumption [5]. Nonetheless, because of the

increasing power consumption, and its wider scale of

threats to the continent, green computing methods have

become a high priority [6].

The rapid expansion of the web technology systems is

also contributing to power consumption issue. Currently

most of business transactions and social interactions are

handled through the web. This involves extensive rates of

downloads and uploading of business and social data that

consumes more power [7]. The Green interaction design

process can play a major role in this regard. In terms

power consumption of interactive systems, screen

technologies, interaction modalities and styles greatly

impacts both: the rate of power consumption, and the

volume of business data streaming. It is also contribute to

lowering risks on human users' health and wellbeing.

This includes all types of interactions scenarios that

might cause physical problems to human users such as

users’ eye problems which is usually caused by the use of

inconsistent interface colors and also the number of gaze

changes as well as traveling length of eye gaze position

on the computer screen [8].

In regard to the issue of e-waste, this problem is

escalating rapidly as a result of the swift growth of

business markets which is even crossing over to less

developed regions. This business expansion involves the

use of more IT artefacts and chemical-based consumables

which are used in the assembly and operation of ICT

systems [7]. Usually organizations and citizens practice

the frequent replacement of IT systems and devices. This

comes as a result of the rapid advancement and

innovations in IT industry. But most of the dumped IT

aretfacts is made by very poisonous materials which

endanger the living species and also the natural resources.

According to Yates (as cited in Mankoff et al. [9]), the

Forrester Research report projects the number of personal

computers in use in the most populous countries to

double to 2.25 billion by 2015 [10]. This would definitely

contribute to increasing the rates of e-waste. For this

reason, e-waste education becomes prominent issue in the

electrical engineering community [11]. The aim to equip

software and hardware engineering graduates with the

proper knowledge about these global issues that

influences their profession.

III. DESIGN RATIONALE MODELS

Modeling is a purposeful abstraction of some part of

reality [12]. And in terms of the design rationale

management, design rationale models are used to capture

an abstract view of designers' deliberations that takes

place during collaborative discussions. It is mainly used

to visually explain the rationale behind decisions taken as

part of any product design activity [13]. This takes the

form of pictorial hierarchy of designers' argumentation

details.

The most common decision rationale models are: DRL

[14], QOC [15] and IBIS [16]. They are all aimed to

codify design decisions including the decisions’ rationale.

This involves capturing different issues, options,

alternatives and justifications behind designers' decisions.

These models vary in their ability to accommodate the

deliberations with the adequate expressiveness power.

The aim is strike a balance between expressiveness and

computational complexity.

IV. THE PROPOSED MODEL

Basically, the proposed model is an adaptation of the

QOC design rationale model [15]. The QOC

representation consists of a number of Questions that are

each answered by a number of Options, which are judged

against a number of Criteria used to judge between the

Options available. The options (positions) demonstrate

several given choices to solve a problem. The Criteria

applicable to any particular Question is linked to all the

answering options, either positively or negatively. This

makes the options more easily judged against one another.

This representation allows the characterisation of

arguments by criteria and thus brings out influences in

decisions taken.

TABLE I. GREEN COMPUTING ISSUES FOR HCI DESIGN

Icon الأيقونة Issue

safer on eyes

harmful to eyes

Finger pain

Harmful to health

Environment friendly

Power saving

Contribute e-waste

Higher power consumption

Because the design process is a cognitive process in

which the designer generates a design concept, makes

design decisions and solves design problem using

expertise, knowledge and situational information to

satisfy design intents [17]. Therefore, we believe that

there is a need to provide the designers with a contextual

guidance that help to construct a shared mental model of

the design problems being solved. This can further

strengthen the design rationale model to become

contextually rich, in terms of green computing context. A

shared mental model of a problem is the combination of

individual designers’ knowledge about the task being

performed, tools available to execute that task, other team

members’ skills and abilities, and the procedures for

interacting with other team members [18]. Because of the

importance of Green IT campaign, we believe that the

incorporation of the Green computing factors within the

rationale models used to capture the deliberations of HCI


30©2017 Lecture Notes on Information Theory

decisions would provide a proper contextual framework

for HCI designers. For this reason, and as shown in Fig. 1,

we expanded the Criteria element of the QOC model to

be contexualised by the characteristics of the Green

campaign. This includes, lower power consumption;

minimal e-waste, less harmful to users’ health and well-

being (See Table I). In addition to any other technical or

business factors, the Green computing factors would give

extra weight to relevant Options in the design space.

Eventually this would have greater impact on the

emergence green software and hardware industry.

Figure 1. The enhanced QOC model

V. PROTOTYPICAL IMPLEMENTATION

This section shows part of our implementation of the

proposed model in capturing HCI designers' deliberation

as part of an asynchronous HCI design sessions. The

screenshot represented by Fig. 2 shows a sample of

design space where two issues (i.e. design questions) are

deliberated to formulate design decisions related to tackle

these issues. Fig. 2 shows two questions which are

deliberated namely: the forms of the software application

outputs; and the colors used for the information

presentation over the screen. Based on the design

questions raised, few options are proposed together with

criteria that support the validity of each option. In

addition to any subjective criteria, a set of Green IT

factors are proposed as shown in Table I. The weight of

the validity and relevance of each proposed option is

determined according to the availability or the lacking of

respective green computing factors. Labeling the design

alternatives (options) accordingly would help to reach

rapid agreement among HCI designers, where

sustainability issues are taken in consideration in all

aspects of HCI design. We believe that the outcome this

process is going to be huge in terms of its reflection upon

the quality of software design. In addition to its positive

reflection on the reduction of environmental threats

caused by powers consumption and e-waste, the

adherence to Green best practices in interaction design

would also help to maintain the physical health and

wellbeing of users of IT resources. This is realised by

reducing physical and psychological fatigues of human

users [8].

VI. CONCLUSION

Sustainability has become a very essential

characteristic in the engineering of all types of products

including hardware and software technologies. The aim is

to design and develop IT artefacts and resources which

can be used very efficiently with less harmful

implications on humans and the natural resources. This

paper proposes an adapted version of the QOC

deliberation representation model which is traditionally

used to capture details of any collaborative decision

making sessions. The modified version of the QOC is

designed in such way that caters to take in consideration

the green computing guidelines as evaluation criteria. The

paper also presented a prototypical scenario for the

exploitation of the proposed model in a typical HCI

design session. As a future work, we plan to extend this

model further to include other comprehensive

components, in the form of multimedia and hyper linked

references that support the selection of Green-centered

design decisions.



Figure 2. An implementation of the proposed model as part of HCI designers’ discussion

REFERENCES

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[2] K. Erdélyi, “Special factors of development of green software

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Manaris, “Incorporating human-computer interaction into the

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[7] A. H. Mohamed, N. E. Bazina, F. A. Alghali, and H. A. Idress.

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BILITY_ISSUES_IN_HUMAN_COMPUTER_INTERACTION_DESIGN

[8] K. Arai and R. Mardiyanto, “Eye based HCI with moving keyboard for reducing fatigue effects,” in Proc. Eighth

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[10] Y. Yates, “Ranking PC growth markets,” 10 July 2007.

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[12] G. Schreiber, et al., Knowledge Engineering and Management: The CommonKADS Methodology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

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Computer Interaction, vol. 6, pp. 201-250, 1991. [16] H. Rittle and M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of

planning,” Policy Science, 1973. [17] J. Liu and H. Zhan, “A reconstruction method of the design

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International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, 2013.

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Dr. Abdulmajid Hissen Mohamed received

the MSc in Information systems from Leeds University, Leeds, UK in 1993 and the PhD

degree in software engineering from the

University of Malaya, Malaysia, in 2004. In 2005, he joined the faculty of information and

communication technology, IIUM University, Malaysia, as an Assistant professor, and in

2007 he become an academic staff in the

department of computer science, the faculty of science, Sebha university. Since 2013 he is on leave from Sebha

University to work in the Libyan Scholarships Bureau, Malaysia. His research interests include software knowledge management, human-

computer interaction, ICT & Islam and requirements engineering.



Proc. IEEE

Engineering

Dr. Abdulsalam Mansour Alshrief received a PhD degree in software agents the from

UMIST University, UK. He is currently

working as an academic staff in the department of software engineering, faculty of IT, Tripoli

University. His research interests include databases, natural language processing, and

software agent technology and software

estimation.

Ms. Mabrouka Ali Jelban is an MSc student in computer science at the department of

computer science, Tripoli University. After

graduating from same department with a BSc in computer science, she joined the

Automation department in the same university to work as a software engineer. Her research

interests include knowledge management,

human-computer interaction and CASE tools.



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